SEALS ANTICIPATE STRESS, CALM SELVES, STUDY SAYS

VA researchers studying the brains of San Diego-based Navy SEALs may have confirmed what your dad always told you: Don’t sweat the small stuff.

By examining neural scans, the La Jolla scientists discovered that SEALs activate portions of the brain that moderate their emotions when they anticipate something stressful is coming. In other words, they calm themselves down in the period before the action starts, instead of getting overexcited.

“The problem with anxiety isn’t when you are anxious in a stressful situation. It’s when you are anxious before that situation ever happens,” said Alan Simmons, a researcher at the VA Center of Excellence for Stress and Mental Health in La Jolla.

“That’s when it really starts to wear on you.”

Researchers at the VA San Diego Healthcare System said this may be why the Navy’s special-operations troops are able to respond well in stressful situations and are resilient in the face of repeated combat tours.

Simmons said if he and his colleagues can determine how SEALs do this — is it innate or learned? — the technique might be taught to other troops.

An article on the research was published Wednesday in the journal NeuroReport.

It details the study, in which Simmons and his team examined 10 active-duty SEALs from Coronado and compared their brain scans with those of healthy men of the same age range.

All the test subjects were shown a series of images that the researchers categorized as negative or positive. While they were anticipating the negative images, the SEALS were more likely than the other men to have activated parts of their brains associated with emotional control centers — the middle insula, a section deep inside the brain, and bilateral frontal lobes.

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the New York-based Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

It wasn’t a broad study, largely because the scientists had difficulty finding enough SEALs to participate.

Simmons called the results a “jumping-off point” for the La Jolla VA researchers, who plan further work along the same line.

One angle that scientists definitely want to target: Do the brains of successful SEAL candidates function like this before they attend the grueling, 21-week Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training program in Coronado? Or does that training, which has a 75 percent dropout rate, produce men who react this way?

“It’s a small sample, but it’s a coherent answer that has really pushed us to get more of the answers we want about resilience and healing,” said Simmons, the study’s lead author and a member of the UC San Diego School of Medicine’s psychiatry department.

He and fellow researchers chose to examine SEALs because they are stationed close by, but they said the same trend might be found in other special-operations branches.

The VA has previously examined brain scans of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression.

Simmons said they found that — in contrast to the calming effect shown in SEAL brain activity — people with PTSD and depression react strongly when anticipating stressful events, even more than healthy subjects do.